Literature has seen many examples of characters and plots been
retaken by writers. Since the Greek, plays and later novels have
been adapted and reoriented. The success of certain figures lies in
the amount of their renewal - at least with regard to their
contemporary impact for the thinking of the respective time. Many
of the famous characters are themselves taken from sources, often
situated somewhere in-between literary and historical origin as in
myths and legends (Electra, Parceval, Hamlet, Faust). Some
characters even get more famous than their creators. They start to
live on their own, leaving the point of historical departure and
their author behind (Don Quixote, Carmen).

That functioning of literary production has nothing unusual. It
does not prove a lack of imagination, on the contrary. Culture and
tradition are built on repeating. Only where is repetition, things
can differ. Though, we do not find a term comparable to the remake
in literary jargon. The adaptation or eventually the arrangement of
a text seems to signify something different, all the more
adaptation is a cinematic expression, too, as if to signify that
the explicit literary work stays in the tradition of literature.
But doesn't a film have to be considered as a text to be
remade? And as a text, doesn't it have to be rewritten? What is
the difference between an adaptation and a remake?

The adaptation plays an entirely different role in cinema. Quite
a number of adaptations insist on the faithfulness towards the
original by keeping its dialogue, structure or whatsoever
(Madame Bovary by
Claude Chabrol, for instance). Films that adapt freely well known
sources are often criticised for the missing of consistence. In one
word: the new film is not lowered in rank by the existence of an
original, and the original is not pushed aside by the film. Both
live in harmony even if the film is a bad one. Taking into account
that the majority of film production is based on novels, one could
go even further: If cinema were to literature what theatre is to
drama? If it were for that reason that we often hear that plays
cannot be adapted in cinema being the wrong medium to do so? And if
cinema therefore were a subordinate medium serving only to fulfil
the literary mission?

the mnemonic technique

Right after its invention, writing needed a less codified medium
as completion. While it served well to record literature, the
performing aspect was lost. Writing did not only ruin natural
memory, but literature as a performing art. The epistemic answer to
the invention of writing in the Greek culture, says Harald
Weinrich, is the invention of a mnemonic technique, the art of
memory. "It comes along with the passage from poetic art (in
the widest sense of the word) transmitted in bounded form to the
rhetoric of prose literature. Because the mnemonic technique is
made for prose that has to abstain from such mnemonic aid as metre
and rhyme." [1]

In the mnemonic technique the memory is spatialised. The memory
artist memorises a fixed number of places that he knows well (Greek
topoi, Latin loci). In that virtual landscape he puts
the contents and ideas he wishes to remember in a definitive order,
after having changed them into images, if they are not some anyway
(Greek phantasmata, Latin imagines). He does so by
virtue of his imagination (Greek phantasia, Latin
imaginatio). Then he has only to walk along the places in
his memory (Latin permeare, pervagare, percurere) to call
one image after the other and to give his speech without
difficulties.

A number of ideas visualised and fixed in a definitive order
within a virtual space to be presented to a group of persons Ã± the
art of memory is not only an art of space (Weinrich. p. 23.), it is
a cinematic technique long before the invention of cinema! This
cinema avant la lettre stays important until the late Middle Ages.
With the mechanisation of writing, it looses its influence. The
moralists first (Montaigne), the enlightenment later (Descartes to
Kant) question the accumulation of knowledge towards the criteria
of reason. (Weinrich. pp. 100, 58-105.) The same epoch sees the
development of a new literary form, the modern novel. It is a
literature that is entirely based on writing and that can hardly be
perceived other than by reading (the reading aloud stays
exceptional). Mirroring the new importance of the individuum in the
age of enlightenment, it is received by a single reader and only
occasionally by a group. The rising of copyright I have discussed
earlier can be seen in this context as another result of the
individualisation (see part one). The
beginning of cultural mass production therefore is equivalent to a
sequestering of the recipients.

The automation of the arts of space (photography) is causing a
third push of innovation. After the artificial memory of writing
and the generalisation of archiving it by mechanical reproduction,
the memorising of locations and a bit later of durations becomes
possible. The invention of moving images is nothing but the
mechanisation of the art of memory. In other words, it is the
completion of the mechanisation of writing. It recreates the
opportunity of collective reception nonetheless keeping the
possibility of single perception alive. It gives back to literature
its performing aspect. For some reason therefore, cinema can be
seen as the fulfilment of literature. So much more as in the case
of the missing of a literary source it produces its own text to
adapt, the screenplay. (Even documentaries use to have some sort of
a screenplay at one point of their production.) But what happens,
when cinema becomes its own text? When a film is no completion any
more of a written source, but the completion of a completion?

success

The remake reminds of the older film, but it does not remember
it. For that reason I believe that Harvey R. Greenberg's
somehow seducing theory of oedipal inflections as reason to remake
a film does not lead very far. Greenberg bases his theory on a
lecture of Robert Eberwein who suggests that "a remake always
exists under the sign of erasure, effecting 'a kind of
reconstruction of the original' Ã [T]he remaker's efforts
invade implicitly forbidden territory, analogous to the child's
'invasion' of the primal scene." [2] Eberwein and Greenberg feel that
there is something paradoxical about the remake. Its production
often is perceived as an aggression against the older film, as an
attempt to replace the older, to make it forgotten by the new
success. For only the success can erase the original.

"It seems to be that it is the essential of success to get
further than the father and that it still is forbidden to wish to
surpass the father." [3] Sigmund Freud's remark on success
leads right away to the oedipal complex. Eberwein and Greenberg
follow this pattern. But if the remaker is the son and the
filmmaker of the original is the father, who is the mother? It
cannot be the remake, because it is the product and not the
companion of the father. The remake rather stands for the taboo
that is broken by the wish to have the same or even more success
than the father by Ã± naturally Ã± using the same means. In fact, the
mother cannot be anything but the audience. It is clearly the
female part in the story, because it has this strange active
passivity psychoanalysis certifies women since Freud at the very
latest. In one word, Eberwein and Greenberg implicitly say that the
remaker is a motherfucker. Their oedipal approach contains a hidden
reproach against the production of remakes as an opportunist and
deceitful act towards the audience.

Writing again a pre-existing novel with the knowledge of the
historical events having happened after the books publication
enriches the older story and makes it more subtle. Borges gives an
ironic but convincing example: Cervantes's choice of the poor
provincial reality of his country as contrast to the knightly
fantasy production is much poorer than Menard's choice of the
country of Carmen's origin Ã± who has been written some 250
years after Quixote. But not only the idea of historical
superiority is leading Menard as if he were benefiting from Helmut
Kohl's "mercy of late birth" (since we are already
talking about anachronic relations). What is important for Menard
is that the original takes advantage of chance. The rewriting on
the contrary does not profit of the aid of spontaneity. Own
impetuous, formal, or psychological ideas have to be wiped out by
irrefutable rational argumentation. The accident is rejected as
origin of the artwork. Inspiration is despised as arbitrary and
therefore as replaceable by any other inspiration. The original in
the sense of the first enunciation of an idea, an event, or a form
is called into question. (Under this angle, the copyright looses
all right to exist.)

the impossibility of the remake

"There is no intellectual act that after all were not
useless". [7] This statement refutes all critical
comments on the remake. Redoing something is not more absurd than
having done the original. Only redoing is more difficult. Pierre
Menard's work must stay a fragment. (His Quixote
contains only the 9th, a fragment of the 22nd, and the 38th chapter
of the novel's first part.) In comparison with the "finite
original", as puts it Borges, it remains a never-ending
gesture of redoing. But it lets appear the novel Don Quixote
under different light. The lecture of the rest of the original text
that has not (yet) been rewritten is already changed by
Menard's vision. (Recently a reconstructed version of the
Quixote has been published. A numerous group of specialists
has been working on the fragments left by Cervantes to find the
original version. In a way the destiny of Orson Welles'
film on Quixote resembles the
original's destiny: the fragments become highly estimated and
the subject of probably hopeless (donquixotesque) research of any
original form. Since I do not have read the "new"
original Quixote, I do not know, whether the scientists took
into account Menard's lecture. But they might ignore that their
reconstructed version only is the result of the 21st century.
Reconstruction and remake are twins of the same feeling of loss of
the beloved original.)

The remake stands for the anachronic thinking of history the
other way round. Not haphazardly, Borges's narrator quotes both
Cervantes and Menard on truth and history: "The truth, whose
mother is history, the rival of time, the archive of all deeds,
witness of the past, example and advice of the present, warner of
the future". He comments on this extract (the one of Menard Ã±
being the same Ã± having much more intriguing implications, of
course) that history is not the investigation of reality, but its
origin. Historical truth is not the event that happened, but our
judgement on it. The original does not have a status quo. It
changes as time changes, and what is more, it better does so!
Because if it would not, it would quickly disappear with time. To
the original can be applied what Wolf Biermann says about men: Only
who changes remains faithful to himself.

As anybody knows, Quixote is a stupid fool who tries to live
again the epoch of knights. He is practising the anachronic gesture
and, of course, he is failing. But in the end of Cervantes's
novel, the vicar, the baccalaureus and the barber seem to regret
Quixote's final conversion. They believe that he has become mad
once more when his talking all of a sudden is making sense, and
they feel that this madness of the mad is normality. As the reader
of Borges's story we are convinced all the same by Menard's
absurd efforts. That stupid fool Menard trying to write again
Quixote fails as well with this anachronic and impossible
attempt. But his failing is his victory, for it makes him become
Quixote himself, who Ã± trying the impossible Ã± became one of the
most famous knights ever. (The failing of the other fool Van Sant
is of a different character: Finishing a film that resembles, but
is not identical, he fails to fail. Therefore he cannot become
Quixote, and his anachronic act stays rather conceptual.)

"for what is remembered has been, is repeated
backwards,
while the real repetition is remembered forwards"
SÃ¸ren Kierkegaard

Not haphazardly, Borges takes Quixote as figure of bow for his
theoretically most important text for the arts of the 20th century.
Quixote obviously is a performer. Menard does get one as well
without a great physical effort. Not his writing matters, but the
act of his writing. The performance of an idea becomes more
important than the idea itself in a time that thinks it has seen
all ideas and developed all ways to express them. Expressing this
aspect of performance through repetition, Borges not only gives us
a theory of the remake, but of the reproducing arts in general.
When I said above (see part one) that the
performing arts can be called reproducing arts as well, we now can
invert that sentence: The reproducing arts must be called
performing arts, too.

Under this angle, the remake becomes a paradigm for the
reproducing arts in general. By repeating a foreign or lets say
found, i.e. not originally created content, it does explicitly what
the reproducing arts necessarily and cinema in particular do.
Producing a film means to repeat each take again and again until it
resembles the intended form. A take cannot be improved itself like
a painting, it has to be repeated to be ameliorated. (Digital
technologies Ã± though the impact of post-production is known Ã±
cannot change that fact as long as one is working with actors.) In
a way, a film is already its own remake for any take has been
remade a several times. The original in cinema does not exist.

Now becomes apparent why the take can be considered as a
readymade not only in the sense of a trace (see part one), but because of its unoriginality and its
repeated nature. Like a found object, the take is not created, but
chosen from a number of other possible solutions. It is given new
meaning by its presentation within a new context. Its repetition
changes its former sense. Kierkegaard's remark that "real
repetition is remembered forwards" has to do with this
paradoxical fact that repetition changes the repeated. It should
not be mixed up with remembrance, at least in the modern sense of
the word. To remember things we tend to put them into museums, to
close them up, to conserve monuments and historic buildings against
any changing, in one word: to mummify our own culture. (Even after
the end of the communist era the first reflex was not to destroy
the statues of Lenin and the others, but to put them into museum
parks - remember the burial procession for a huge Lenin statue in
The Glance of Ulysses
by Theo Angelopoulos.) That sort of remembrance has a lot to do
with an angst of loss, but nothing with an idea of continuity.
Remembering is orientated towards something past and gone. Being
based on the logic of technical invention, modern society denies
continuity but believes in the principle of quantum leaps.
Suggesting that repetition is to modern men what remembering was to
the ancient; Kierkegaard takes into account that if there is such a
thing like remembering in modernity comparable to the ancient
culture of continuity, it is not the backwards-orientated
remembrance. To the ancient, taking conscience is remembering. To
the modern, living is repeating. [8]

The practise of loam architecture expresses a different attitude
towards culture. Not the shaped material is supposed to last
forever, but the form - independently to the material. Hans
Wichmann has called the loam construction "architecture of
transitoriness" [10]. "In the contrary to it,
explains Wolfgang Lauber, stays the occidental conception of life
with its ambition to create durability, to conserve souvenirs in
the monumental, in constructions of granite, reinforced concrete,
refined steel and glass. Models for that were the early cultures of
the Egyptian Nil valley that continue to live in our heads after
centuries with their granite monumentals, granite panelled
pyramids, and their cuneiform inscriptions, engraved in everlasting
stone boards. This attitude towards transitoriness was passed on by
the Greek and the Romans to the occident up to our days where even
grave stone grotesquely tempt to endure the death of man."
[11]

The remake is neither an analogy to theatrical performance of
continuance nor to the reconstruction of loam architecture. The
rigid medium film mummifies an articulation. Remaking therefore
signifies the historisation of repetition. If we read the remake in
the sense of Kierkegaard as repetition forwards than the
performance of the remake is a double paradox. The first lies in
Kierkagaard's term itself, the act of repetition forwards, the
second in the attempt of fixation what can only be an act. The
remake therefore does not stand for a modern kind of remembrance. I
agree with Robert Eberwein's saying that it "exists under
the sign of erasure". Only, the oedipal reading is suggesting
a somehow aggressive motivation to make the original forget (be it
conscious or unconscious). The double paradox moreover demands a
more passive understanding in relation to the medium itself. We
have seen that the mummification of an articulation in a rigid
medium can lead to the oblivion of the tradition or the specific
sense it stands for. That characteristic of the medium does not
disturb in a culture, where progress counts most, which is the
reason why Plato's warnings have not been heard (see part one). But it must necessarily do so, when it
comes to the remake. The two movements forward and backward,
repetition and fixation (i.e. historisation) neutralise each other.
They seem to give promises they cannot keep in any direction.
Pretending to be performing art (repetition) and reproducing art
(fixation) at the same time, the remake seems to suggest that there
is another way besides original and plagiarism. (Performing and
reproducing arts converge literally in a remake of Fail-Safe. George
Clooney had convinced Les Moonves, the president of CBS, to remake
Fail-Safe, a war movie
done 1964 by Sidney Lumet. Under the direction of Stephen Frears
and with Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss, Brian Dennehy and Harvey Keitel
the remake was broadcasted on 9th April 2000
in black and white and - live.[16]) This might be the
reason for the provocation it represents and the taboo it breaks:
It opposes the two columns of occidental arts. But the remake
cannot keep the promise of a third way. Rather the contrary is the
case. Neutralising its own content, the remake produces and stands
for a certain amnesia. It is the amnesia of its medium (film)
towards the recorded, the amnesia of the outer distance towards its
original, and the amnesia of the present to the past as well as the
past to the present. Refusing the logic of continuity and
improvement just as the nostalgia of a golden age, the remake -
phenomenon resulting out of a technical invention at the dawn of
modernity - expresses the loss of identity of modern man. It must
be considered as one of modernity's great artistic
expressions.

[2] Harvey R. Greenberg. "Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking
as Contested Homage in Always." In Play It Again, Sam.
Retakes on Remakes. Edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y.
McDougal. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1998: University of
California Press. And Robert Eberwein. "Remakes Writing under
Erasure," presented at the Florida State University Conference
on Literature and Film 1988, p. 127.